Court regarded it as unjust to forbid people to take their slaves, or
other property, into the territories, the common property of all the
States.

Meanwhile, in the previous year (1856) the recently established Court of
Appeals of New York had, in the landmark case of Wynehamer _v._
People,[64] set aside a state-wide prohibition law as comprising, with
regard to liquors in existence at the time of its going into effect, an
act of destruction of property not within the power of government to
perform "even by the forms of due process of law". The term due process
of law, in short, simply drops out of the clause, which comes to read
"no person shall be deprived of property", period. At the same time
Judge Comstock's opinion in the case sharply repudiates all arguments
against the statute sounding in Natural Law concepts, fundamental
principles of liberty, common reason and natural rights, and so forth.
Such theories were subversive of the necessary powers of government.
Furthermore, there was "no process of reasoning by which it can be
demonstrated that the 'Act for the Prevention of Intemperance, Pauperism
and Crime' is void, upon principles and theories outside of the
constitution, which will not also, and by an easier induction, bring it
in direct conflict with the constitution itself."[65] Thus it was
foreshadowed that the law of the land and the due process of law
clauses, which were originally inserted in our constitutions to
consecrate a specific mode of trial in criminal cases, to wit, the grand
jury, petit jury process of the common law, would be transformed into a
general restraint upon substantive legislation capable of affecting
property rights detrimentally.

It is against this background that the adoption of the Fourteenth
Amendment in 1868 must be projected. Applied, as in the Dred Scott and